Rarely if ever have I seen such a brave, bawdy, thought-provoking work or such brave, bawdy, bold performers. The experience is akin to a dream–you wake the next morning not quite convinced you’ve spent an evening in such company, with so many strange yet obviously meaningful images and encounters, arranged in some semblance of a narrative that only you can finally interpret. Thank you for taking a chance that A2 audiences would rise to this provocative occasion.

It seems to happen at least once a season–UMS snares a performance that’s only happening in a handful of venues in North America, if that. Teatro Regio’s William Tell was this year’s stealth thriller. Like a fair-weather football fan, I’d planned to escape at the half. But the irresistible energy and precision of Noseda and his musicians held me to the end. I learned from this performance (unfamiliar piece and performers, a story I thought I’d known but didn’t), as is so often the case with UMS offerings. And what a treat to have something so radiant in the otherwise list-ridden, shopaholic, gray-skied month of December. Thank you!!

Count me among the fans of this production. At its heart, such a simple and elegant story–but what extraordinary means by which to tell it. It’s the most effective use I think I’ve ever seen of film as live theater–and live theater as film. A stage filled with technology and yet all of it deployed for such deeply human ends. Please bring back this company so that word of mouth can do its thing and fill the auditorium next time. The only way to appreciate this unique and ingenious work is to see it.

Thanks for the insights, Anna and Carl. I’d wondered how it felt to be a volunteer (and hope others who volunteered during the run of this show might offer their thoughts as well). I still find the show disturbing–perhaps in good ways, though I’m not sure. We so often ask ourselves how human beings have been coerced to participate, en masse, in horrific, system-wide events like genocide or slavery. This show offers something of an answer. It’s still remarkable to me that Drummond persuaded his volunteers to take aim and fire at him–and that the rest of us sat and watched because we trusted the actor and found the process, in some measure, entertaining. I think this raises difficult questions.

I stayed. We all did. No one moved when Rob Drummond, as the ill-fated magician William Henderson, gave us the chance to leave the theater before the climactic moment when an audience member fires a gun directly at his mouth.
The question is why we stayed. The answer has much to do with manipulation, I think. Drummond’s extraordinary manipulation of theatrical magic, of the audience-actor bond, of the kind of trust we instinctively adopt when we buy a ticket to a play and believe that what we’re about to see is fiction. And safe.
At least I think that’s why I stayed. I’m still trying to parse what I experienced at the Arthur Miller Theater tonight. Much of the 75-minute “performance” happens in real time to real people—chiefly Drummond and the extraordinarily unassuming, marvelously funny Carl, whom Drummond picked (in mysterious ways involving lots of eye contact and trust, the word of the evening) from the audience at the outset of the evening. Parts of the show were clearly scripted and acted, other parts not. (When it comes to teasing out the best in an audience volunteer, Drummond is as gifted as NPR’s Michael Feldman. He seems equally gifted as a clairvoyant—I can’t be the only audience member who’s shaking her head tonight and wondering how he did that.)
It’s a riveting evening, for sure. Little chance of nodding off.
And yet. I’m disturbed more by the way Drummond manipulates his volunteer than by the admittedly disturbing finale (or, for that matter, the lead-up to the finale, a nerve-wracking shell game involving a broken beer bottle and Drummond’s hand). What made me wince more than anything were the intimate confessions Drummond wheedled from his amiable volunteer. Would you be comfortable speaking ad hoc and onstage about your religious beliefs or your current state of happiness or your wealth or your most pleasant sexual memory?
Drummond—who’s thoroughly likable in this piece, btw—tests the bounds of the implicit agreement between audience and performer that’s at the core of every live theater experience. If you’ve ever been curious about those bounds, this show’s for you.

An interesting possibility, which Ken Ito proposed during yesterday’s panel discussion with the Center for Japanese Studies, is that Sasuke is in fact the one who scalds Shun-kin …

At the end of the last UMS season, there was a pretty lively online debate about Anne Bogart’s The Trojan Women—which one viewer loathed—and the kinds of shows in general that UMS puts on. The debate seemed to fade in the general haze that settles in with the end of the semester and the start of summer, but I’m wondering if it might not be revived in the wake of this week’s mind-stretching production of Shun-kin by Complicite and Japan’s Setagaya Public Theatre.

Western this isn’t. Clear, linear narrative it isn’t. Quick-paced it’s not. In fact there’s little—besides the familiar drab interior of the Power Center and the exquisite artistry of Complicite, which has played Ann Arbor twice before—to make you think been there, done that, I know where this is coming from.

Most mornings I say a prayer in which I ask to be granted some new vision of God’s truth. I feel as though that’s what director Simon McBurney and his troupe have done (though without any express mention of God, I should stress).

The power of Shun-Kin rests both in the infinity of small and beautifully staged moments the actors enact—many of them with breathtaking low-tech ingenuity—and the cumulative impact of a two-hour plunge into darkness and shadow. To experience Shun-kin is to be immersed in a world anathema to the bright-light, Times-Square, pulsing glare of everyday life in the West.

That’s not to say it’s an easy evening. There are stories within stories within stories. The title character is sadistic. It’s in Japanese, with surtitles. I was there on a Wednesday night, in the middle of a work week, and the stage is very, very dark, and the action at times hypnotically slow. Like shavasana, the conditions are ripe for a snooze. At times I longed for light.

And then it came, in a passage as jarring as any I’ve experienced in the theater. A friend said afterward it reminded him of how it felt to be jolted back into reality after a week-long yoga retreat.

That’s when you feel the full salutary impact of this remarkable work, which is very much about the beauty to be found in darkness—a concept fairly alien to most of us. (How many fluorescents are in your office?).

Shun-Kin is based, in part, on Jun’ichiroTanizaki’s remarkable 1933 essay “In Praise of Shadows,” which readers can find in Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay. The show runs at the Power Center through Saturday night. Anyone up for a debate?

And thank you, Prue, for all you’ve done over the years to help make it possible for this amazing organization (UMS) to be audacious and risk failure.

I love this exchange on the Lobby today, love the fact that theater—live theater—can provoke such thought and passion, both pro and con. Isn’t that why we go? We could have all stayed home and enjoyed the balmy evening and kicked back in front of our TVs and saved the ticket money, but for whatever reasons we didn’t. Do I always like what UMS offers? Do I always feel I’ve gotten my money’s worth? (How do you even calculate that?) Of course not. But thank god they’re not serving up predictable fare. That’s when I’d stay home.
Was Trojan Women uneven? Sure. Did Jocelyn Clarke take questionable liberties with Euripides’ text? You bet. (Though it was interesting to hear Anne Bogart say today that one reason the company dispensed with a chorus was “we couldn’t afford it.” Ditto Athena, who in the original script engages in a long dialogue with Poseidon, but in this production doesn’t even show up. “We couldn’t afford two gods,” Bogart quipped.)
Did this production make me think twice about the play, make me reflect on its meaning and on my own preconceptions? Absolutely. I didn’t love all of it. I didn’t always get why the actors were hanging around instead of vanishing the way they do in Euripides’ text. (Bogart explained today she wanted an ensemble piece, Chekovian in nature, rather than a sequence of two-part dialogues. She wanted the women to serve as their own chorus.) I came home from the production and thumbed through my copy of The Trojan Woman looking for some reference to a hermaphrodite. Didn’t find it. Didn’t quite get what was up.
But were there moments onstage last night that ripped through me? Yes, yes, and yes. Andromache’s gorgeous, patiently rendered evocation of her love for her husband. The exquisite narrative in which the (single male) Chorus came downstage and with dancelike motions described the invasion of Troy by the horse-hidden Greeks. Hecuba’s howls. Hecuba’s one-liners. The riveting moment when Helen at last walks offstage and shadows first slice off her head and then cast her utterly in darkness while Cassandra plays in the light just beyond her. The way the viola came and went, shaping the action, hauling voices with it.
Theater exists in the moment. Euripides’ text will outlast this production. Another director will have her way with it. There’ll be more Helens—let’s hope another 2,500 years of them.
This afternoon, Bogart talked about the relationship between performers and audiences. She said a cast doesn’t “speak to just one kind of person. You speak to different parts of each person.” So this Trojan Women may not have clicked with some theatergoers. But it’s got us talking to one another. It’s got us going back to our copies of the play and thinking again about the issues Euripides addresses. It’s got me, at least, thinking not about the price of tickets but about the price of war, and about human nature, and about men and women, and about our drive to tell one another stories by acting them out in front of each other. May that process continue.

“Men will do anything to get what they want.” That’s Odysseus speaking near the end of the SITI Company’s stark and searing Trojan Women, one of the great anti-war plays in the repertory. Maybe it’s because I’d just watched a couple of installments of Nicholas Kristof’s Half the Sky, about the global oppression of women, or because lately I’ve been thinking and writing about eastern Congo, where rape is a weapon of war (with an estimated 200,000 surviving victims), but I couldn’t shake those words as I left the theater last night.

Nor could I keep from making connections between what happens in this bleak 2,000-year-old text by Euripides and what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. Watch SITI’s timeless take on this timeless text, and onsider what it means to inhabit a place where war has been raging for 10 years. There’s a reason this tragedy “keeps coming back,” director Anne Bogart said in last night’s post-performance Q&A. (For a contemporary take on the kind of desperate situation Euripides paints in The Trojan Women, read The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers’s bleak indictment of America’s 10-year occupation of Iraq.)

There’s so much to admire in this production—the haunting soundscape, the sacred circle of black rubble where Euripides’ women act out their grief with both ritualized gesture and miniature moments of endearment, the bare-bones feel of the thing. I was reminded time and again of Peter Brooks’s edict that the only thing needed for theater to take place is one person walking across an empty space while another watches. Bless Bogart and her ensemble for stripping away the kind of scenic and aural clutter that bogs down so many contemporary productions. Surely this comes close to what ancient Greek theater felt and looked like.

Most astonishing of all is the astonishing Ellen Lauren, whose Hecuba is at once terrifying and beautiful and grotesque and lyrical. This is a monumental performance of a role that’s as tough as they get—as Lauren herself says here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrenWl-ZGtk

Think Lear in the storm scene on the heath, and you begin to get a sense of what’s on offer at the Power. I heard more than one person remark after last night’s show, “How can she possibly have enough voice left for another performance?” There’s one way to find out—go this afternoon.

I stood in line for what seemed like hours to hear Hillary Clinton speak at Hill in 1998, and then suddenly felt the line surge forward and into the auditorium. Turns out Ms. Clinton, then first lady, realized she’d never take the stage on time if the security screenings continued, and so she told the guards to stop checking and just let people in. (At least that’s the story.) We packed the auditorium. I’ve admired her courage ever since. I fear the gesture will never be repeated–not in a post-9/11 America.

Actually, this set stays in the U.S. They use another one for Europe. Ferguson said this’ll be shipped back at the end of the U.S. run and probably destroyed–I didn’t have a chance to ask him why not destroy it over here? Is it cheaper to do it by the pound?!

And thank YOU, Mark, for seven lively and provocative Night School sessions. It’s clear from Monday night’s discussion that this is an idea whose time has come–and that’s due in no small part to your organizational and pedagogical skills. Looking forward to Night School 2!

Glad to see a bigger house on Saturday night, but Power should have been packed each time Yves Jacques performed his wizardry. The show had many of the same elements that made “Einstein on the Beach” such a draw. A bold and original artist (Lepage) at its core, gorgeous stage pictures, an eye-popping blend of high-tech magic and low-tech whimsy, an intricate narrative with moments of such abstraction the mind could wander off in the most pleasurable kinds of reverie. If this show had had primacy of place in the season, as “Einstein” did, with the same pre- and post-show attention, instead of being shoehorned into the middle of the mad month of March, I suspect the crowds would have come. Lepage deserves that kind of attention–bring him back!

This show is a gift, a small miracle, a haunting tribute to Andersen (who KNEW?!), Lepage, and the prodigious Yves Jacques, whose feats of memory and stamina have much to teach all of us about the capabilities of the human instrument. But what’s lingering with me on this, the morning after, are the vision and intelligence and imagination behind this piece—how Lepage went looking for Andersen and found himself, found the human condition, really. There’s nothing sappy about this peek into Andersen’s fairy-tale world. I can see why it’s been a tough sell for UMS—you can’t reduce this work to a sound bite, thank god. It’s complex and mind-bending and sweet and tough and edgy and beautiful and ugly all at once, and it says so very much about who we are and how we live, and the stories we tell ourselves. Don’t miss this!!

A Theater of Images

Somehow Robert Lepage’s Andersen Project has slipped under the cultural radar. A pity. Surely Lepage’s work merits some of the same attention and buildup that Einstein on the Beach got at the start of this calendar year. Maybe it’s bad timing. March is a tough month in A2, and this piece—which, to judge from the slide show on its website (http://lacaserne.net/index2.php/theatre/the_andersen_project/), is visually every bit as ravishing and provocative as Einstein—is squeezed between last week’s CSO and Max Raabe, and next week’s SF Symphony. Never mind March Madness.
As UM’s Malcolm Tulip reminded the class at yesterday’s Night School session, Lepage is the real deal: a theatrical visionary whose risk-taking stagecraft is the stuff of playgoers’ dreams and actors’ nightmares. (Witness the infamous “machine” at the heart of Lepage’s Ring Cycle currently playing the Met.) Said Tulip, “Lepage is willing to imagine it and make it happen. He’s fearless. He uses anything at his disposal.”
A2 audiences who saw Far Side of the Moon here a couple of seasons ago may remember the eloquent and often whimsical stage pictures Lepage creates. A moon that turns into a front-loading washing machine that turns into a spaceship … “This is a theater of images, not of psychology,” said Tulip. “Lepage shows not only what is but what can be.” It’s the sort of theater a hearing-impaired audience would relish—where images communicate as much, if not more, information than words.
It’s a bit hard to get a sense of what the Andersen Project really is from the advance copy: an iconoclastic director’s take on an iconoclastic writer (Hans Christian Andersen), set in Paris—past and present—with ruminations on fame and recognition, sexual identity, the clash between romanticism and modernism. All of this generated by a pair of Andersen fairy tales (“The Dryad” and “The Shadow”). No matter what it turns out to be, I know Lepage will provoke in ways that turn my imagination loose, and I can’t wait. We’re lucky to have this show in our midst.

Branding

Yesterday I heard Brahms’s German Requiem in a superb performance by the UMS Choral Union and the Detroit Symphony. In a warmup interview on WJR, I’d heard Jerry Blackstone, who conducts the Choral Union, compare Brahms to a “well-made German car,” and listening to yesterday’s concert, I realized he’s right. Even my little Passat has a weight and sturdiness—a gravitas, if you will—that Japanese and American cars lack, and there’s more than a touch of that same sobriety and earnestness to Brahms’s magisterial rumination on death.
All of which got me to thinking about renegades. Because I can’t quite conceive of anyone using the term to describe Brahms, with his grandfatherly beard and girth, his sturdy repertoire. Which begs the question: why Beethoven and not Brahms? Could it be the hair?
Last week’s concert by the Hagen Quartet—an exquisite rendition of three Beethoven quartets, plus a mysterious, and sublime, encore that even my musicologist husband can’t pinpoint, though he’s sure it’s late Haydn—was listed as part of UMS’s “renegade” series. On the one hand it makes all kinds of sense (Beethoven as the ultimate maverick, revolutionary, tormented genius, what-have-you), but on the other it gets you wondering what the term signifies. Or rather, what kinds of expectations it sets up in an audience? If you listen to Beethoven as Beethoven, is this a different experience from listening to him as a “change-agent” or renegade? Do you hear differently? Focus on different facets of the work? Think differently as you’re experiencing the music? Are you more aware of historical context? Do you say to yourself, for instance, “My, that Beethoven’s adventurous. So much more interesting than this Brahms guys who’s kind of predictable, like my Volkswagen.”
A related question came up at last week’s Night School. Can a contemporary artist like Wayne McGregor truly merit the name “renegade,” and if so, what happens to him and his work? Does McGregor now feel the need to live up to that role? Does he change his work so that it pushes the bounds of the radical in ways that may be less genuine than if he were simply pursuing his work as before? What happens to his perception of himself? As someone asked on Monday night, “What do you do when you’re hired to break the mold?”
The commodification of “maverick”: it seems worth revisiting the idea as we move forward with this series and contemplate the possibility of more such series in the future. UM is big into branding these days, and maybe UMS is too. Maybe it’s a helpful thing. But I wonder if this kind of slogan might not be a bit too glib. At the very least, it seems worth asking to whom, and to what effect, the term should be applied.

Some random thoughts on McGregor/Random Dance’s FAR:

From 18th-century song to throbbing rock and techno rhythms, played loud; from torch to electric light and ultimately digital sequences: this is an age of enlightenment, but whose? Theirs? Ours? The act and art of discovery—discovering (uncovering) the body. Dancers, like toddlers, delighting in fingers (digits!), limbs, torsos. Exploring.

I find myself wondering if we’re still capable of the kind of amazement that our 18th-century forebears experienced, or if the wonders of the technological revolution we’re experiencing right now have numbed us. Is McGregor drawing comparisons between that earlier age of enlightenment and our own enLIGHTenment?

Echoes of Einstein on the Beach—each of these two performances with its blinding bars of manufactured light. In McGregor’s case, is the curious, mother-board-like backdrop of light a reference to the human brain? As recognition shifts in and out, the lights blink on and off, organize themselves in sequences—neurons firing? And then there’s the difficulty of seeing bodies—ourselves—in the dark. This is especially difficult in an age of torches, but in our own age, the bright lights of too much information can also plunge the body into shadow. (I think of the people I see everywhere around me, hunched over their little screens, thumbs wiggling, bodies inert. It’s as if we’ve been decapitated, ghost bodies made up of little more than eyes and thumbs.)

What constitutes genuine knowledge, as opposed to mere information? Surely that’s being asked here as well.

As with Einstein, FAR culminates in, or at least leads to, a love duet. Human love: tender gestures after so much confusion, violence, energetic “oscillation” (that wonderful word from Einstein). The multiplicity of ways that two bodies can be entangled. The extraordinary ways the limbs and torso can bend. Again, we’re discovering—and McGregor and his dancers are illuminating. This is a thoughtful piece, a piece about thinking, about the mind channeling its energies into the body, the firing of neurons from thought to twitch.

McGregor said on Thursday that dance pieces need to be seen twice (or more) in order to be grasped. It’s true of this one. Wish UMS had given us a second or third chance.

Traveling

Last night’s Tallis Scholars concert: Gesualdo and a raft of Renaissance composers, all of them edgy, bold, melancholy in their way. (Director Peter Phillips, introducing the encore: “These renegades—they’re a sad lot.”) The subtle, unexpected shifts in tone, an almost imperceptible slide down the scale—Glass’s minimalism four-hundred years before Glass? Consonance blurring into dissonance, and vice versa. What is the vocabulary of these composers? It seems worth asking—in the same way that Wayne McGregor spoke at yesterday’s Stamps lecture of a choreographer’s vocabulary, by which he means the particular language he or she invents to convey ideas and images. True of Wilson and Glass and Messiaen, even of the annoying Landau. You enter a space—a literal performance space, the figurative intellectual and/or emotional space of the creator’s mind—and the language changes. McGregor suggests dance pieces need to be seen more than once in order to “acclimatize yourself” to their universe. Ditto music—you need to hear it at least twice. (Is this true of narrative spectacles—plays—as well? Or unique to the non-narrative and abstract?) We’ve talked in clichéed ways of the Renegade series as a “journey,” but the cliché turns out to have its verities. There’s an itinerary, with scheduled stops, rather like a cruise through multiple countries. Ask yourself with each one: What and how do they speak here? What sort of currency do they trade in? How do they dress? What makes them comfortable? What’s the weather like? What are the rituals? How eagerly to they accommodate strangers? Do you need a passport? A guide? A translator?

Is it better to go into something like Einstein on the Beach, or Messiaen, or next week’s Gesualdo and Wayne McGregor performances, prepared, forewarned, beefed up with readings and lectures and discussions? Or just go and make of it what you will? The question came up last night in the second installment of UMS’s Night School, and I found myself thinking back to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s first A2 residency in 2001. The company was presenting marathon performances of the Henry VI–Richard III tetralogy, and I remember friends scrambling to read all four plays ahead of time and filling up on pre-performance classes, etc. At one pre-performance roundtable with a dramaturg from the RSC, a woman in the audience asked nervously, “I haven’t had time to read the plays and I’m afraid I won’t understand what I’m seeing. What do you recommend?” The RSC dramaturg shot back, “You’re one of the lucky ones! Not to have read the plays—you’ll experience them the way Shakespeare meant them to be seen, as theater.” I’ll confess I hadn’t read the plays at that point either, and his answer came as a relief. But also a warning of sorts—against too much pre-thinking. These things are meant to be experienced for what they are, after all, not as some kind of weird final exam for dutiful students.
Gesualdo expert Glenn Watkins and Clare Croft. It’s helpful to have a few guideposts. Listen for the harmonies in Gesualdo, the excruciatingly beautiful and unexpected shifts, the slowness of grief and speed of life and liberation. Watch for the spidery quality of McGregor’s choreography, pay attention to what light reveals—and doesn’t; ask yourself who’s real onstage and who’s not, who might be pure memory. Jim Leija, UMS education director, said that the cast of Einstein on the Beach had been fairly thrilled by the A2 response to their work. “They felt the community was ready for the work,” and for better or worse, I suppose we were.

What happens when renegades clash? That’s assuming Daniel Landau, creator of the video triptych paired with Messaien’s From the Canyon to the Stars at Sunday’s performance by the Hamburg Symphony, is a renegade. If you define the term as an “outlaw” or “rebel,” one who rejects allegiance, I suppose he might count. But if you take the broader definition UMS seems to be striving for in this 10-week series—change-agent, visionary, artist-to-be-reckoned-with—I think not.
I have yet to meet an audience member who wasn’t infuriated by the concert. As we were pulling on our coats at the end of the performance, the older man who’d been sitting next to me muttered, “That’s one DVD I’m not going to rush out and buy.”
The contrast with last week’s Einstein could scarcely have been more pronounced: instead of losing myself in the exhilarations of abstraction, I battled distraction, looked down at my lap, closed my eyes, anything to shut out Landau’s incomprehensible take on Messiaen’s mystical music. (Maybe if I’d seen the video as a stand-alone piece I’d have been more forgiving. Maybe. Was the Hamburg Symphony trying to shove social action down our throats, by any means? What did the musicians think of the inanities parading across the video screens above them?) With Einstein I was dimly aware of time passing but blissfully unaware of how quickly or slowly it was moving. Here I was excruciatingly cognizant. This is no slur against Messiaen, whose music, difficult and jarring though it was/is, was also deeply inviting. I wanted to give in to its strange and surprising effects, its tantalizing evocations of wind and birds and canyons and water, its timelessness. But Landau’s insistently narrative video kept getting in the way. I’d never quite realized before how powerfully narrative constrains our experience of time. Where Messiaen—and the stellar performers from Hamburg—seemed to want to blast open time and space, Landau kept yanking us back into his tawdry little story. The last thing I wanted was chronology, the clock ticking.
Impossible, at Sunday’s performance, to enter Messiaen’s world. I wanted to imagine his birds, wanted to dig below my own musical prejudices and preferences, gnaw through the surface difficulty of his score and hear the earth, which is anything but consonant. Landau put a stop to that. So we had a butting of renegades: the video maverick clanging heads with the symphonic change-agent, and the result was cacophany.

Thoughts, post-Einstein, on what constitutes a renegade or maverick (though my preferred term now would be “change-agent,” or something a little less associated with cow brands and guns and the American West). A renegade/maverick/change-agent:
• Changes, in some fundamental way, how we view things. Wilson, with the “fervent oscillations” of this pulsing, often frenetic production takes us both inside his singular mind and that of Christopher Knowles, the young man responsible for spoken text in Einstein; Knowles was diagnosed with autism as a kid, and I felt throughout the opera that I was being let or led into his existence (was it Knowles, not a young Einstein, boxed inside a glass capsule in the climactic spaceship scene, clawing to get out?). And Glass’s fervently oscillating music, its impossible-to-count notes and numbers and words (I disagree with Cage: not too many notes, Philip, but just enough to send us into some other wavelength);
• Engenders a new vocabulary (visual, aural, linguistic)
• Reframes the familiar, shatters cliché (or employs it to good effect: the lone scientist in the window, scribbling on the wall; the sudden narrative love story at the end of a non-narrative five-hour abstract painting)
• Moves us without being sentimental (does this count as “renegade”? I’m not sure)
• Completely, utterly jars our expectations, from the get-go (I’m in a new space, I’ve never seen anything like this before, I thought as I entered Power and saw and heard the performers onstage in the first of Wilson’s five “knee plays”)
• Dares to do what you shouldn’t: produce something wholly uncommercial, wholly unaffordable; make it last five hours without a break (or seven days, as Wilson did with a show years ago in Iran). In Absolute Wilson, the HBO documentary, Robert Wilson says, “Sometimes you say to yourself, ‘What should I do next?’ And people advise you, or you decide yourself, what to do next. And quite often you’re trying to think of what is the right thing to do. But quite often, if you think, ‘What is the wrong thing to do, what should I not do,’ and then do that.”
• Warps time; flexes space (as Einstein’s theories did)
• Distorts the familiar
• Haunts us

Going forward—I’m thinking now of future seasons, not the current one—I hope UMS will be true to the concept of “renegade” and not simply slap the term onto shows because it’s convenient or they need to flesh out a series within a series. Einstein sets a high bar. Keep it there.